The short history of the Natural History Collection of Nógrád County
The public collection which currently has 16 000 items, contains minerals, rocks
and fossils, mainly from the territory of Nógrád County and Northern Hungary.
The founding piece of the collection bearing the inventory number 1956.1
Chlamys latissima, is a Miocene Badenian cockle-shell from Mátraverebély.
The first steps of the collection and the related research work took place in the
Palóc Museum of Balassagyarmat. The first curator of the collection was Baron
Béla Lipthay, who was a self-taught natural scientist with extensive knowledge,
and with research and collection work. His main area of research was
entomology. His collection of 60 000 pieces of butterfly has been transferred to
the Hungarian Natural History Museum. In addition to collecting butterflies, he
has also acquired the basics of palaeontological collecting work and has
collected 1200 ancient plant prints mainly from the Paris Stream Valley in
Nógrádszakál and the Botos trench in Ipolytarnóc.
The scientific processing of the finds collected by Béla Lipthay was carried out
by Klára Rásky, Gábor Andreánszky, Márta Szakály and Lilla Hably. These
fossil floras have been cited in the international scientific literature until the
present time.
After the death of Béla Lipthay, the collection had no curator for a decade.
In 1984 Dr. János Hír transferred it from Szécsény to Pásztó, to form the basis
of the work carried out in the Museum of Pásztó, which was still being
organised at that time. From then on, the collection was mainly enriched with
Quaternary vertebrate and mollusc materials.
A rich small vertebrate material was added to the collection by a research
programme on vertebrate paleontological studies of Middle Miocene terrestrial
sediments beginning in the 1990s.
In the 1990s and the 2000s, the collection was also enriched with significant
values, minerals, fossils and contemporary marine molluscs skeletons through
gifts and purchases. The most important donors were Istvánné Sándor Szabó,
Péter Hegedűs, Gyula Rakottyai, József Fekete, Bence Horváth.
Between 2005 and 2013, due to the work of Andrea Pászti, a natural science
museologist working as a project manager, the Natural History Collection was
placed into 21st century conditions in 2011, within the framework of TIOP 1.2.2
EU tender, into the study warehouse of the monastery building.